[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":163},["ShallowReactive",2],{"person-en-v-hemapala-perera":3},{"id":4,"title":5,"artistId":6,"birthYear":7,"body":8,"born":126,"description":127,"died":128,"era":129,"extension":130,"heroImage":131,"imageCredit":132,"imageLicense":133,"imageSource":134,"meta":135,"navigation":136,"notable":137,"path":138,"roles":139,"seo":141,"sources":142,"stem":161,"translated":136,"url":145,"__hash__":162},"peopleEn\u002Fen\u002Fpeople\u002Fv-hemapala-perera.md","V. Hemapala Perera",2994,1942,{"type":9,"value":10,"toc":117},"minimark",[11,20,23,28,31,38,41,45,48,51,54,57,61,64,67,74,77,81,84,87,91,103,110],[12,13,14,15,19],"p",{},"The first instrument he owned was a mouth organ, bought by his mother for a boy who had just gone blind. He would not put it down. He carried it about the house the way another child carries a stick, and when he was admitted to the Badulla hospital he took it into the ward and slept holding it. He had wanted one because a cousin used to play a tune on his — \"Suhani Raat\", from the Hindi film ",[16,17,18],"em",{},"Dulari"," — and would not let him try it, on the grounds that he would get spit on the reeds.",[12,21,22],{},"Some sixty years later, V. Hemapala Perera's flute is on more Sinhala songs than anyone has ever counted.",[24,25,27],"h2",{"id":26},"pinnarawa","Pinnarawa",[12,29,30],{},"Vithanage Hemapala Perera was born on 20 October 1942 at Pinnarawa, the second village you pass coming into Badulla on the Colombo road, the youngest of six children of Romiel and Nanda Perera. He was put into the village convent's primary section at three and was in the first year at four.",[12,32,33,34,37],{},"At the start of the school holidays that year the immunisation team came round. His sister was in the same class and had her injection first; it stung a little, and the two of them walked home. Both children ran a fever. His sister's passed. His did not: sores the size of ",[16,35,36],{},"weralu"," fruit came up over his whole body, and he was taken to the Badulla hospital, where the doctors decided on twenty-four injections and cut every one of the sores open with scissors. Around the twelfth, tissue began to grow across one eye, and three operations under chloroform failed to save it.",[12,39,40],{},"The right eye had gone by the time he was four and a half. He had, as he puts it, seen the world with one eye. Then that eye began to close too, and he walked back to his village holding his mother's arm. His own accounts differ on the year — he has said nine in one interview and eight in another — but his schooling stopped there. What his parents did not do was the thing many families did: hand the child over to the blind school at Ratmalana and stop visiting. They moved to Badulla instead.",[24,42,44],{"id":43},"the-teacher-who-came-at-half-past-eight","The teacher who came at half past eight",[12,46,47],{},"Long before there were lessons there was a monthly concert: Hemapala's father hired a group of Badulla musicians to come to the house once a month, paid them, fed them for the day, and had them play from morning to evening, for no reason except that his blind son should hear music.",[12,49,50],{},"Then the family found a teacher. Both interviews he has given in Sinhala name him J. M. Amaranath; English Wikipedia has J. M. Amaratunga, son of a musician known as Sadiris Master. He arrived at about half past eight in the morning and taught until ten at night, with breaks only to eat, and he did not charge for it. He taught the boy tabla first, then flute, then violin; a brother gave him a mandolin, and a guitar arrived as a gift. Hemapala learned to memorise pitches by ear — to this day he plays a song by having heard it — and eleven years of this, from about 1953 to 1964, was his entire formal education in music.",[12,52,53],{},"The teaching had one gloriously eccentric feature. When a good Hindi film came to the picture houses, the teacher would take the blind pupil along, narrating the story as it went and steering his attention to the score and the songs. Some days he would sit the boy in the yard with a flute or a violin in his hands, tell him a short story aloud, and ask him to supply the music for it. That is how he learned what a sad scene sounds like and what a happy one sounds like — the working method of a film composer, taught to a village child in Badulla with no institution involved at all.",[12,55,56],{},"By 1964 there had been a falling-out between master and pupil, and the lessons ended. Hemapala kept going on his own, borrowing books, getting friends to read to him, and following All India Radio's classical programmes on a set his father had given him.",[24,58,60],{"id":59},"grade-one-on-five-instruments","Grade one, on five instruments",[12,62,63],{},"A relative took him to the M. G. P. Kalayathanaya at Mulgampala in Kandy, where a teacher named Cyril Perera heard his flute and mandolin and introduced him to Ediriweera Sarachchandra at the University of Peradeniya. Sarachchandra recorded a solo, brought the tape to Colombo, and got it in front of the radio station.",[12,65,66],{},"His flute was broadcast for the first time on 28 September 1968, at a quarter past ten at night.",[12,68,69,70,73],{},"The following year the station held one of its periodic grading examinations, with Dr Deodhar brought from India to sit on the panel. Hemapala Perera came out of it as the only flautist in Sri Lanka holding the top grade — ahead, as he notes without much diplomacy, of players who had studied in India and did not immediately forgive him for it. A re-grading in 1975 left him where he was. But the flute is not the peculiar part: he was graded at the top level in classical performance on ",[16,71,72],{},"five"," instruments — flute, violin, mandolin, guitar and tabla. Nobody else on Sri Lankan radio has done that, and he is also credited with being the first in the island to play Hindustani classical repertoire on guitar and mandolin.",[12,75,76],{},"Passing brought a half-hour programme of his own each month and a place in the station's concerts, and it was there that the rest of his career started. He met Sujatha Attanayake, who asked him to play flute in her show, and through that circle the session players and composers of the light-music world: D. D. Gunasena, M. K. Rocksamy, Stanley Peiris, Sarath Dassanayake. \"Edward Jayakody, Sunil Edirisinghe, Abeywardena Balasuriya, Victor Rathnayake, Rohana Weerasinghe,\" he says, \"brought me in on every single thing they did.\"",[24,78,80],{"id":79},"the-credit-that-was-never-printed","The credit that was never printed",[12,82,83],{},"Here the article runs into a wall, and it is worth saying so plainly rather than filling the space. Sri Lankan record sleeves, cassette inlays and film titles almost never named session musicians, so there is no published list of the songs V. Hemapala Perera's flute is on, and any list produced now would be guesswork. What is documented is the circle: Attanayake's first recordings, then the sessions run by Sarath Dassanayake and Stanley Peiris through the 1970s and 1980s — the two composers who between them scored a large share of Sinhala cinema in those decades.",[12,85,86],{},"His theory about why the flute and blindness go together is briskly unromantic: bamboo is the cheapest instrument there is. But he will also tell you why the instrument is what it is. \"Nothing is brought in from outside to make the sound of a bamboo flute,\" he says. \"You take a piece of bamboo, clear the node at one end, leave the node at the other, bore a hole and blow, and there is a sound.\" What travels down the tube is breath, and breath carries feeling from the player to the listener with nothing in between.",[24,88,90],{"id":89},"teaching-and-an-argument","Teaching, and an argument",[12,92,93,94,98,99,102],{},"In 1986 C. S. Jayasekara invited him to teach flute at the University of Aesthetic Studies, and he stayed about twenty years; he has also lectured at the University of the Visual and Performing Arts and at Sri Jayewardenepura. On 30 June 2016 the SLBC gave an evening at its Ananda Samarakoon Studio to ",[95,96,97],"strong",{},"සත්සර ආනන්දය"," ",[16,100,101],{},"Sathsara Ananda",", a programme built around his flute playing, and in December 2017 he received the Kala Bhushana title.",[12,104,105,106,109],{},"He is not a comfortable elder statesman. He thinks Sri Lankan music education is a mess, and that the country never developed a melody instrument of its own to stand beside its drums — it should have taken the ",[16,107,108],{},"horanewa",", drilled more holes in it and given it a proper scale, the way Chinese musicians spent decades extending theirs. He is also impatient with the habit of sorting Sinhala singers into the serious and the commercial, pointing out that there are lines worth respecting in songs by Sunil Perera and Nihal Nelson that get dismissed as bazaar music without anyone listening to them.",[12,111,112,113,116],{},"\"People who can see are less inclined to think,\" he told ",[16,114,115],{},"Anidda"," in 2019, \"because the eye is so powerful. It grabs objects, and off it goes after them. When that side is shut, the power of thinking increases. That is when a blind person sees the bit of the world nobody else has seen.\"",{"title":118,"searchDepth":119,"depth":119,"links":120},"",2,[121,122,123,124,125],{"id":26,"depth":119,"text":27},{"id":43,"depth":119,"text":44},{"id":59,"depth":119,"text":60},{"id":79,"depth":119,"text":80},{"id":89,"depth":119,"text":90},"20 October 1942","Blinded as a child by a reaction to a school vaccination, he became the only musician graded at the top level by Sri Lankan radio on five instruments, and the flute on countless Sinhala recordings.",null,"1960s-2020s","md","\u002Fimages\u002Fpeople\u002Fv-hemapala-perera.webp","Classical Music Society, University of Moratuwa","Unverified — fallback source","https:\u002F\u002Fwww.youtube.com\u002Fwatch?v=Ur2wc7ztkF4",{},true,false,"\u002Fen\u002Fpeople\u002Fv-hemapala-perera",[140],"Musician",{"title":5,"description":127},[143,146,149,152,155,158],{"title":144,"url":145},"Hemapala Perera — Wikipedia","https:\u002F\u002Fen.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FHemapala_Perera",{"title":147,"url":148},"පෙනෙන මිනිස්සු හිතන්න යොමුවෙනවා අඩුයි — අනිද්දා, 27 August 2019","https:\u002F\u002Fwww.anidda.lk\u002F%E0%B6%B4%E0%B7%99%E0%B6%B1%E0%B7%99%E0%B6%B1-%E0%B6%B8%E0%B7%92%E0%B6%B1%E0%B7%92%E0%B7%83%E0%B7%8A%E0%B7%83%E0%B7%94-%E0%B7%84%E0%B7%92%E0%B6%AD%E0%B6%B1%E0%B7%8A%E0%B6%B1-%E0%B6%BA%E0%B7%9C\u002F",{"title":150,"url":151},"එක ඇහැකින් ලෝකය දැකපු මම — වී. හේමපාල පෙරේරා, Hiru FM Gossip, 19 April 2019","https:\u002F\u002Fgossip.hirufm.lk\u002F32084\u002F2019\u002F04\u002Fhemapala-perera.html",{"title":153,"url":154},"වී. හේමපාල පෙරේරා – සත්සර ආනන්දය — Lanka Views, 29 June 2016 (archived)","https:\u002F\u002Fweb.archive.org\u002Fweb\u002F20160702214154\u002Fhttp:\u002F\u002Flankaviews.com\u002F%E0%B7%80%E0%B7%93-%E0%B7%84%E0%B7%9A%E0%B6%B8%E0%B6%B4%E0%B7%8F%E0%B6%BD-%E0%B6%B4%E0%B7%99%E0%B6%BB%E0%B7%9A%E0%B6%BB%E0%B7%8F-%E0%B7%83%E0%B6%AD%E0%B7%8A%E0%B7%83%E0%B6%BB-%E0%B6%86%E0%B6%B1\u002F",{"title":156,"url":157},"More than 200 artists receive the Kala Bhushana Award — Ceylon News, 14 December 2017","https:\u002F\u002Fwww.ceylonnews.lk\u002Farchives\u002F5736",{"title":159,"url":160},"V. Hemapala Perera — Sinhala Artist Biography (archived)","https:\u002F\u002Fweb.archive.org\u002Fweb\u002F20200923083939\u002Fhttp:\u002F\u002Fwww.sinhalachord.com\u002F2011\u002F05\u002Fv-hemapala-perera-sinhala-artist.html","en\u002Fpeople\u002Fv-hemapala-perera","miVHj1SkSpQfpvrne7KVSoSFnA1Dd4qolfD0VNDFBE8",1787999333990]